Tag: brides-cond

Windows Defender now removes Superfish malware… if you’re lucky

First the good news. Microsoft today released a signature update for Windows Defender, the anti-malware software that’s built in to Windows, to enable it to both detect and remove the Superfish malware that Lenovo installed on some systems . Defender’s removal process seems to be quite robust, both uninstalling the software and removing the dangerous certificate that Superfish installs. However, it doesn’t appear to clean any contaminated installs of Firefox or Thunderbird; for that, you’ll want to check out our manual removal instructions . Uh oh… 2 more images in gallery Now the bad news. While Windows Defender is supplied as part of Windows and works well enough, Microsoft gave it some rather strange behavior  as a concession to third-party anti-malware vendors . If a third-party anti-malware product is installed, Windows Defender will automatically disable itself. Many Lenovo systems include trial versions of anti-malware software; during the duration of these trials, Windows Defender will be inactive. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows Defender now removes Superfish malware… if you’re lucky

Linux has 2,000 new developers and gets 10,000 patches for each version

Nearly 2,000 developers started contributing to Linux in the past 15 months, making up nearly half of all developers writing code for the open source operating system kernel. The new developers are helping fuel an ever-bigger Linux community, according to the latest Linux Kernel Development report, which will be released today by the Linux Foundation. The report is expected to be available at this link . “The rate of Linux development is unmatched,” the foundation said in an announcement accompanying the report. “In fact, Linux kernel 3.15 was the busiest development cycle in the kernel’s history. This rate of change continues to increase, as does the number of developers and companies involved in the process. The average number of changes accepted into the kernel per hour is 7.71, which translates to 185 changes every day and nearly 1,300 per week. The average days of development per release decreased from 70 days to 66 days.” Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Linux has 2,000 new developers and gets 10,000 patches for each version

Samsung’s first 14nm SoC is a 64-bit, 8-core Exynos aimed at high-end phones

Samsung has just announced a new high-end Exynos 7 Octa SoC . It uses eight CPU cores—a combination of four high-end Cortex A57 cores and four low-end, power-saving Cortex A53 cores in a big.LITTLE configuration—and supports the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set. However, its most significant new feature is Samsung’s new 14nm manufacturing process, which promises performance and power consumption improvements compared to the existing 20nm process. Samsung is already shipping eight-core 64-bit Exynos chips on its older 20nm process, most notably in the Galaxy Note Edge and some variants of the Galaxy Note 4. Compared to those chips, Samsung claims that the 14nm version “enables up to 20 percent faster speed, 35 percent less power consumption, and 30 percent productivity gain.” Those numbers don’t tell us much in terms of actual clock speeds or performance-per-watt numbers, but it’s safe to assume that the 14nm Exynos 7 will be able to run at higher clock speeds for longer while consuming less power. We don’t know anything about the new Exynos’ GPU yet. The 20nm Exynos 7 Octa uses a high-end Mail-T760 GPU from ARM, and we’ll probably see something similar in the 14nm version. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung’s first 14nm SoC is a 64-bit, 8-core Exynos aimed at high-end phones

South American ice chemistry records rise of Incas, arrival of Spanish

Ice cores are often relied on to be natural archives of past climate, capturing information that predates both our measurements and our greenhouse gas emissions. They’re a way of having records of the natural world that we don’t have a history of. However, natural archives like these can also act as records of human history, either directly (via fossils or artifacts) or indirectly. In mountainous regions, glacial ice doesn’t go as deep into the past as in Greenland or Antarctica, but it can tell stories of the recent past with excellent resolution. Airborne pollutants, for example, stand out sharply in measurements of the ice. They don’t say “pure as the driven snow” for nothing. Not much of this kind of work has been done in South America, though. Some lake sediment archives have shown the influence of local mining, but the timeline was fuzzy. In a new study, a team led by Chiara Uglietti , now at Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute, has produced a detailed ice core record of air pollution from Peru’s Quelccaya Ice Cap that goes back to the year 793. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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South American ice chemistry records rise of Incas, arrival of Spanish

Assassin’s Creed movie officially in production

The long-awaited Assassin’s Creed movie is finally moving ahead, with Ubisoft revealing the film has officially entered production. The video game adaptation will be released on December 21, 2016. Word of the production came from the most mundane of places though—Ubisoft’s quarterly financial call. The publisher is co-producing the film with studio New Regency, which has had a golden period in recent years with films such as 12 Years a Slave , Birdman , and Gone Girl under its umbrella. “We have the pleasure to announce today that the green light has been given by New Regency, and the production has already started,” said Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot. “This is a very important milestone for the project and for our team on Assassin’s Creed .” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Assassin’s Creed movie officially in production

Google announces SPDY’s coming demise as HTTP/2 approaches

A little over five years ago, Google unveiled SPDY, a new protocol that it positioned as a more secure, better-performing replacement for hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), the communication protocol on which the Web is built. Today the company announced that it would soon be removing SPDY support from Chrome. That’s because the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working to update HTTP to produce HTTP/2, an updated revision of a protocol that has not seen any major changes since its introduction in the early 1990s. SPDY’s major goals were to reduce latency and improve security. To reduce latency, it included support for multiplexing—making multiple requests and responses over a single connection, with prioritization for different requests—and for security, it makes the use of TLS compulsory. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google announces SPDY’s coming demise as HTTP/2 approaches

Somalia is no safe refuge for torrent site

In the world of online piracy , it seems like it’s one in, one out at the moment. While The Pirate Bay returned  last week, Kickass Torrents has now been taken down via a domain name seizure. The site, which was already blocked from direct UK access as a result of high court blocking orders, now turns up an error message when users attempt to access its Somali .so domain. A look at its Whois record  shows the site listed as banned. The Somali registry was seen as a safe haven for the site, away from copyright holders and their lawyers, but it appears the takedown was a result of a claim. Several other sites with a .so domain, including the unaffiliated scam site kickasstorrents.so, have also been taken down, which indicates a far-reaching block on any URL with “kickass” in it that is based in the country. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Somalia is no safe refuge for torrent site

Understanding M.2, the interface that will speed up your next SSD

Most solid-state drives released within the last year or so have been too fast for the bus they’re connected to. The 6Gbps SATA III spec was finalized in the days when rotational hard drives still ruled and SSDs were rare, ludicrously expensive, and relatively unreliable. There are a couple of different standards that have been created to solve this problem, and they both solve it in the same basic way. One, SATA Express , uses the same physical connector as older SATA drives but uses PCI Express lanes rather than the SATA bus to boost storage speeds. The other, which will be more common in space-constrained mini-desktops, all-in-ones, and Ultrabooks, is called M.2 (previously NGFF, for “Next-Generation Form Factor”). M.2 is interesting not just because it can speed up storage with PCI Express lanes, but because it can use a whole bunch of different buses too; it stands to replace both mSATA and mini PCI Express, two older standards that have been used for SSDs and Wi-Fi cards in laptops for a while now. Intel’s new Broadwell CPUs and their chipsets include native support for M.2 and PCI Express boot drivers—neither PCIe-connected storage ( hi Apple ) nor the M.2 connector itself are new, but beginning with Broadwell systems each of those two things will become much more common. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Understanding M.2, the interface that will speed up your next SSD

Malicious Google Play apps (may have) hosed millions of Android handsets

Security researchers have once again found Google Play offering malicious apps that have been downloaded by millions of Android users. According to a blog post published Tuesday by antivirus provider Avast, the apps include the Durak card game app and at least two other titles. Combined, those apps have been installed as many as 15 million times. Researcher Filip Chytry wrote: When you install Durak, it seems to be a completely normal and well working gaming app. This was the same for the other apps, which included an IQ test and a history app . This impression remains until you reboot your device and wait for a couple of days. After a week, you might start to feel there is something wrong with your device. Some of the apps wait up to 30 days until they show their true colors. After 30 days, I guess not many people would know which app is causing abnormal behavior on their phone, right? Each time you unlock your device an ad is presented to you, warning you about a problem, e.g. that your device is infected, out of date or full of porn. This, of course, is a complete lie. You are then asked to take action, however, if you approve you get re-directed to harmful threats on fake pages, like dubious app stores and apps that attempt to send premium SMS behind your back or to apps that simply collect too much of your data for comfort while offering you no additional value. It’s not the first time Google’s official Android app bazaar has been found to host malicious apps. In the past, it has offered titles laced with surreptitious remote access trojans , Bitcoin miners , and rogue advertising networks . Three years ago, Google introduced a cloud-based scanner that scours Play for malicious apps , but attackers have been known to bypass it . Google officials regularly remove apps from Play when they are found to be malicious. At the time this post was being prepared, all three flagged by Avast remained available for download. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Malicious Google Play apps (may have) hosed millions of Android handsets

Over 300 businesses now whitelisted on AdBlock Plus, 10% pay to play

Since 2011, AdBlock Plus, a popular browser plug-in that blocks online ads, has kept a “whitelist” of websites that are allowed to serve ads despite the presence of the AdBlock Plus plugin. In an e-mail to Ars, AdBlock Plus Communications Manager Ben Williams wrote that currently, the browser extension has granted a pass to “over 300 sites/entities” out of “over 1,500 applicants” to the company’s whitelist. That’s up from October 2013 , when AdBlock Plus allowed the ads of 78 sites or entities out of 777 applicants. To be placed on AdBlock Plus’ whitelist, advertisements must be transparent about being ads, must be appropriate to the site they’re being served on, and must not distort or disrupt the page content, among other criteria. AdBlock Plus goes into more detail about the whitelisting process here . But one important facet of the business plan is that if a company is big enough, AdBlock Plus’ parent company, German start-up Eyeo, asks for a fee in addition to adhering to the “Acceptable Ads” criteria before it allows a company to be whitelisted. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Over 300 businesses now whitelisted on AdBlock Plus, 10% pay to play